I have “a thought came to me” and it has been changed to “a new thought came to me.”
Everybody has to make a living, Marc, but this is absurd.
At one point my protagonist uncovers ten tons of silver, and your editor has added the line “It was a treasure room!” My God, what a discovery!
My protagonist, in a boat, rows it around the end of an islet in the river. Your editor has it “I moved the ship around the end.” How the Hell could he do that?
I have my character wading ashore from an islet in the river, but for some reason your editor has interposed the word “far” in referring to the shore. That means he waded across a river deep enough to carry ocean-going vessels!
Several times “captain” has been cut out and “Sir” put in its place. In those days, Marc, as you know, the term “Sir” was only applied to one who had been knighted. It was many years later (despite some fiction writers) before the term “sir” became merely a title of respect. At this time it was wholly improper to call a captain “sir.”
Chantry wants a ship (and your editor keeps adding “And a crew” which is completely wrong as what he wishes to do is catch a ship that is trading along shore and get passage back to England).
He adds the word “voraciously” when a hungry man is eating. It is one of those trite expressions used so much by people who have never really been hungry. I have been. A truly hungry man cannot eat “voraciously” and does not. His stomach would have shrunk. He would eat slowly, savoring every bit. On the first day he could eat a little, on the second more. After that he might for a few days, eat “voraciously.”
In the past I have tried to leave the editing and get on with the job. My first real shock came with RIVERS WEST when over half the book was cut out. It was already in print and nothing could be done about it. Fortunately, I caught TO THE FAR BLUE MOUNTAINS.
My stuff has been butchered in the past, and it must not happen again. I want to see every script after it has been edited and I want no rewriting or rephrasing. If I am unclear, just indicate it and I’ll do the rest. This has caused me much trouble and embarrassment in the past, and I simply cannot go on this way.
There were not five pages in the entire 372 where changes had not been made, most of them unnecessary, some purely arbitrary. I am sure your editor is a nice person and has my best interest at heart, but let him work on somebody else’s stuff or learn to edit, not re-write.
If this had been an editing job you would have had the manuscript back the next day. As it is I had to cover it page by page and at times became so irritated I could not put up with working on it much at one time.
My first impulse was to chuck it and have you send me another script entirely, but then I decided to go over the work so as to save time. But the script I am now returning is the one I want to go to Dutton, and no other. I erased most of the changes. Some were legitimate and I let them stand.
RIVERS WEST, because of what was done to it, is one of my least satisfactory books. I would have to check the ms. but my guess is that at least 100 pages were cut out of it.
I hope this is the last time this has to be discussed. I want only to write and not worry about such things. I lost several important days when I should have been preparing a new story to be written in Colorado in going over this ms. and undoing all the work that somebody took a lot of time in doing.
Remember, after this I want to see every script after it has been edited. I don’t like it, and it is going to hold things up, but I’ll be damned if I want this to happen again.
I will be at the Strater in Durango for the next two weeks. There is to be the first formal signing of a peace treaty between two Indian tribes (Comanches and Utes) and they have asked me to be present. After the 5th I may go on up to the Medicine Wheel in Wyoming, or return here.
I have two more stories in the file but do not want either of them out at this time. I shall, now that this is off my hands, get on with [your] next book. Which should be soon as I have several stories well-started.
Sorry about all this—
Sincerely,
Louis L’Amour
First things first: The greatest asset any writer can have is a good editor. All writers need editing; their job is creativity, not perfection. And good editing is a great deal more than correcting spelling, grammar, and punctuation. It is very rare that you ever read the original text of any writer without its having been improved by an editor.
An important aspect of an editor’s job is to help the author tell the story he wants to tell, in the way he wants to tell it. We all find it easier to simply fix things than to try and understand and then explain why those things need to be fixed. However, in my limited experience the most intelligent thing for an editor to do is to simply identify the problems rather than create his or her own solutions. The author can then choose to deal with the issue in his or her own words.
Dad was pretty easygoing, but you can tell he was riled up. In this letter he repeats Marc’s name over and over, something his characters often do when they are angry and telling someone off. Oddly, it was not a verbal trait of his—I don’t think I ever heard my father do it in conversation.
Up until this point, Dad tended to finish a manuscript, hand it to my mother to proof, and then ship it off to the publisher. In many cases he never looked at it again. But Fair Blows the Wind was the third book in four years that had suffered from what Dad considered to be excessive and arbitrary editing.
I am not entirely sure what happened with Rivers West, the first of the three books. When I examined it, I found that the original manuscript had been significantly marked up by an editor, and yet not all of those many cuts and changes made it into the novel that eventually showed up on bookstore shelves.
In the case of To the Far Blue Mountains, we were very lucky. Dad received a call from Art Jacobs, a San Diego–based wholesaler who was a friend of ours. As usual, Art had received his books days ahead of the “on sale” date and had decided to pull one out of the box and read it. He called up to tell my father he was enjoying the first few pages, and Dad just happened to ask what the final page count was. The number was shockingly low. The book had been severely cut.
A phone call was placed to Marc Jaffe, and Marc immediately recalled the books. Thousands of them. From all across the country. In a truly heroic effort, the full text of To the Far Blue Mountains was restored, and the book was reprinted, with only a minimum number of (author-approved) edits.
Why this happened, and why it continued to happen in this final instance of Fair Blows the Wind, is somewhat of a mystery. Dad explained it to me by saying that some editors seemed to feel all his books should be roughly the same length, that they were unaware he was trying to do something different and break away from the slim and traditional Westerns of the past.
This could well be the case. If so, it was really one of the last hurdles that he had to overcome. Though he continued to mix in shorter books similar to the novels that started his career, within a year or so more sizable efforts like Bendigo Shafter, Comstock Load, and The Lonesome Gods were appearing more and more regularly.
In the end, all this controversy led to a very positive outcome. Fair Blows the Wind was returned to its earlier form, and Marc Jaffe took the opportunity to hand Louis over to a new and very special editor, Irwyn Applebaum. Irwyn was the younger brother of Stuart Applebaum, who was already working with my father at Bantam in his role as publicist. The Applebaum brothers would be Louis L’Amour’s editors and closest advisors for the rest of his career…and remain dear friends of our family even to this day.
Beau L’Amour
July 2017
To Bob and Roberta…
Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour
NOVELS
Bendigo Shafter
Borden Chantry
Brionn
e
The Broken Gun
The Burning Hills
The Californios
Callaghen
Catlow
Chancy
The Cherokee Trail
Comstock Lode
Conagher
Crossfire Trail
Dark Canyon
Down the Long Hills
The Empty Land
Fair Blows the Wind
Fallon
The Ferguson Rifle
The First Fast Draw
Flint
Guns of the Timberlands
Hanging Woman Creek
The Haunted Mesa
Heller with a Gun
The High Graders
High Lonesome
Hondo
How the West Was Won
The Iron Marshal
The Key-Lock Man
Kid Rodelo
Kilkenny
Killoe
Kilrone
Kiowa Trail
Last of the Breed
Last Stand at Papago Wells
The Lonesome Gods
The Man Called Noon
The Man from Skibbereen
The Man from the Broken Hills
Matagorda
Milo Talon
The Mountain Valley War
North to the Rails
Over on the Dry Side
Passin’ Through
The Proving Trail
The Quick and the Dead
Radigan
Reilly’s Luck
The Rider of Lost Creek
Rivers West
The Shadow Riders
Shalako
Showdown at Yellow Butte
Silver Canyon
Sitka
Son of a Wanted Man
Taggart
The Tall Stranger
To Tame a Land
Tucker
Under the Sweetwater Rim
Utah Blaine
The Walking Drum
Westward the Tide
Where the Long Grass Blows
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Beyond the Great Snow Mountains
Bowdrie
Bowdrie’s Law
Buckskin Run
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour (vols. 1–7)
Dutchman’s Flat
End of the Drive
From the Listening Hills
The Hills of Homicide
Law of the Desert Born
Long Ride Home
Lonigan
May There Be a Road
Monument Rock
Night Over the Solomons
Off the Mangrove Coast
The Outlaws of Mesquite
The Rider of the Ruby Hills
Riding for the Brand
The Strong Shall Live
The Trail to Crazy Man
Valley of the Sun
War Party
West from Singapore
West of Dodge
With These Hands
Yondering
SACKETT TITLES
Sackett’s Land
To the Far Blue Mountains
The Warrior’s Path
Jubal Sackett
Ride the River
The Daybreakers
Sackett
Lando
Mojave Crossing
Mustang Man
The Lonely Men
Galloway
Treasure Mountain
Lonely on the Mountain
Ride the Dark Trail
The Sackett Brand
The Sky-Liners
THE HOPALONG CASSIDY NOVELS
The Riders of High Rock
The Rustlers of West Fork
The Trail to Seven Pines
Trouble Shooter
NONFICTION
Education of a Wandering Man
Frontier
The Sackett Companion: A Personal Guide to the Sackett Novels
A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, compiled by Angelique L’Amour
POETRY
Smoke from This Altar
LOST TREASURES
Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1
ABOUT LOUIS L’AMOUR
“I think of myself in the oral tradition— as a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That’s the way I’d like to be remembered—as a storyteller. A good storyteller.”
IT IS DOUBTFUL that any author could be as at home in the world re-created in his novels as Louis Dearborn L’Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally “walked the land my characters walk.” His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L’Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.
As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family’s frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.
Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L’Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs, including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, miner, and an officer in the transportation corps during World War II. He was a voracious reader and collector of books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.
Mr. L’Amour “wanted to write almost from the time I could talk.” After developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L’Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 120 books is in print; there are more than 300 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.
His hardcover bestsellers include The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel), Jubal Sackett, Last of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L’Amour stories are available from Random House Audio.
The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L’Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life’s work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.
Louis L’Amour died on June 10, 1988.
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